Everyone goes bladetastic

HP WILL SHIP the first blade servers based on Intel's Itanium processor some time next year.

This means it will be able to offer HP-UX on its BladeSystem product range, currently only available with x86 processors like the Xeon and AMD's Opteron running Windows and Linux.

Also on the blade front, Sun and IBM have scored a deal whereby Sun's Solaris 10 operating system will run on IBM's BladeCenter servers.

"We've signed up our first tier 1 systems vendor as a Solaris supporter: It's IBM, and their decision to provide comprehensive support for Solaris on BladeCenter definitely puts them ahead of the other blade vendors in offering a truly OS-neutral product," said Sun president Schwartz on his blog. µ